Coming Through the Rye
by xXxJazzy B. RealxXx
Summary: His star-crossed life was a quadratic equation he was unwilling to solve. "Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves." /Teen Angst/


Title: Coming Through the Rye  
Category: Cartoon/Movie » Treasure Planet  
Rating: **PG-17**  
Genres: Teen Angst / Hurt » Comfort / Sci-Fi / Violence / Macabre / Ideologically Sensitive / Some Adult Situations  
Published: September 13, **2004**

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_All character rights reserved to Ron Clements, John Musker, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Rob Edwards, and Robert Louis Stevenson. All O.C. rights reserved to the fan-fiction's author._

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_ Author's Note ∞ _

This is a _"will I or won't I?"_ _sneak preview_ of a 2004 test-run for a film I've recently reconnected with. This insider only exposes the story's early-middle, so the timeline will be rewinded and thrown back to "everything's beginning" for the first chapter.

There are dark themes in this, so as a "misguided youth," Jim is_ more extreme_ than his _Disney counterpart_, and so are his associates. My primary purpose from this 2004 fossil was to relandscape a rawer background on the protagnoist's mental constitution and the morality tales he digests from life before _this story's version _of the space quest. _  
_

* * *

**::Prelude:: ¶ Hidden Orchestra**

* * *

_"I would rather feel like total shit sometimes, and God the rest of the time...and just like―okay all the time..." **~{Manic} **_

* * *

The trio ordered what was available.

The café didn't have any _Milky Ways_, so they got themselves _Jam Rolls_ and _custard tarts_. As they took their trays to the outdoors, Jim watched Houlden's mother now ― sliding him into his seat, sorting out the table's coloring pages for him, smacking his hand away from a pastry ― and it became even easier for him to cut her drug abuse out of the family portrait. But he knew, that on the cusp of reality, it was as invisibly real as the existence of gravity. Underneath the cheeks that were rosed pink from the morning chill, underneath the smiling teeth that were as perpendicular as the eighteenth century tiles on his grandmother's walls ― he _knew_ it was still there, and he _knew_ he had to air it out sometime soon.

In that same sentence, he couldn't say he had the best grasp on the framework; he didn't understand the natures of addiction, opium poppies, harlotry, sex, or anything relating to the people under all the bow-ties and tea-parties of his mother's Inn. He heard the _"Say No to Drugs!" _and_ "Say Yes to Abstinence!"_ seminars in the school auditorium, and trashed the educational flyers before the oral presentations were over. He had sampled his first _blunt_ at the back of the schoolhouse, and trashed it before taking a second drag, but he couldn't _relate_ to someone who had a whole catalog of poison in their system.

Jim often tried to imagine all the horrors and ecstasies of what it was like to live in a world full of drugs and hell raising, no rules or bindings to a single platter in sight ― but mentally, he couldn't touch it. He couldn't even get close. The fifteen year old refused to umbrella all the reasons for her doings under, _"Daddy didn't hug me!" _stereotypes, but to his naive mind, it was still just a matter of moral collapse, and therefore, the formula was simple:

_Quit._

If she quit, she'd be stable.

If she quit, Houlden would have a better life...wouldn't he?

―"Jim?"

His face lit up. "Mm?"

The young mother patted her son's hand and mouthed, _"Watch him for a bit."_

It took him about ten seconds to read her lips and sync the dialogue together, but he nodded his compliance. She swept the crumbs off her legs and departed from the table with a quick salute over her shoulder. Jim scooted his chair in as he watched her go, remembering the second and last time she walked away from them in her own apartment ― stashing a ball of tin foil behind her back, locking the bathroom door, leaving them in silence without so much of a, _"I'll be right back..."_

He remembered feeling angry, bitter, mortified, outraged, heavyhearted, despaired, broken, afraid ― _he was all of it,_ but he still couldn't open his mouth; still couldn't lift his feet off the ground; still couldn't tell her to _stop, pause, halt_, and think about things. It was like he was standing outside of himself ― walled between the real world and the world he _thought_ he knew, watching a character wearing his face in some colorless, sepia-flaked film begin to recite the screenwriter's script: _"You're just a useless kid...blinking up at the big world of adults."_

Watching her walk through a restroom door now, Jim wondered if she was itching to abandon her toddler at this very moment. He had the whole storyboard drafted out in his head: her slinking out of the emergency window like a flea-infested feline, leaving nothing but a fallen earring behind, and leaping the fence to track down some stash in the crack of a wall...

_'...Tsh! Yeah, right.'_ Jim mopped up the butter on his plate with a piece of bread. _'You're being dramatic.' _He slouched in his seat and pouted._ 'She's not going to be that insane in the membrane―'_

"Jim...?"

Houlden.

Jim drank his water, burped, and sighed refreshingly. "Yeah..."― he dried his mouth―"What is it? Gotta hit the can?"

He could tell that Houlden had struggled to secure the weight of this next sentence, because the confession dripped out like a wet cloth:

"...I wanna write a letter to Daddy," Houlden put forth, forehead in one hand, crayon scratching out his coloring pages in the other. "...I love him very much, so I miss him sometimes..."

Jim's face went limp, as though all the bones had been crushed.

"No one ever tells me anything about Daddy...who he was, or if he's even alive, but I'll bet he'll love me harder than Sully does."

An irresponsible, emotional reply exploded out of Jim's mouth before he could remember his position as the boy's senior: "Have you ever even _met _him?"

...Houlden's face drew in. "..._No_, and it doesn't _matter!_ He's _my_ Dad, not _yours!_ I can love 'im if I _want to!_"

"..."

The ball was in the toddler's court.

The defeated teenager fisted his hands on the table and married his glare to the wall. Jim was hardened by the disappointment, fear, and anguish that his own father abandoned him with, and this spunky, fatherless boy was forcing him to regurgitate it. Compared to Houlden's bucket of rainbows, Jim's feelings towards his father were demons that coiled around his true personality like sea monsters guarding a treasure chest.

_"But by facing those feelings, you could slay them, Jim. You just have to try..."_

_"...That would never happen, Mom."_

His mind was far too much like his father's library, in which diagonal slits of light would come slipping in through the windows; only touching on empty book shelves, dust mites, and spiderwebbed corners. It was only when he sailed did he ever become suffused in sunlight ― some _rainbowed_ mark of _passion_. His last refuge was a solar-surfer, to help hide himself there ― _there,_ in the clouds, with the sun and blue beyonds! But once off it, his sunlight was sucked back into the clouds, and he was dark shadows again; a locked drawer stuffed with unread letters.

Jim didn't reflect his rays back to the people on Montressor the way the sun did ― the way _Houlden_ did. He retreated into a satellite existence and hovered on some distant planet that no one could ever hope to expedition...

So, Houlden reached across the table, and with a perfect demonstration of innocence, shook Jim's arm to pull him off that horizon. "Hey..."

When Jim continued to sit there with a tight guard on his heart, Houlden continued to shake his arm with a tight persistence in his face.

_"Hey, _you! I said_―Hey!"_

Jim's jaws clamped over his teeth. "_What, _kid?"

Houlden flinched back at this brutal show of detachment, but the toddler's counter-glare reminded him of a cat seeing its reflection for the first time. "...I said it 'cause...because I need...I need someone to help me _write_ it."

Irony.

"...You...wanted me to _help_...?" Jim's hot temper disbursed, and it showed in his forehead.

"Yeah..." Houlden looked at Jim, searching the blue eyes that held so much in their shallow waters.

Being asked to get involved with _Daddy _sentiments probably should've hit Jim where he lived, but his spite was tromped by the fact that Houlden clung to him even after his bad reaction. Jim's fast mouth could even provoke the wrath of kinder kids to kick his ass to the curb, but Houlden's acceptance was the result of his simple, naive vision, and nothing else.

"What do you write in letters...?" Houlden flipped his coloring pages on the back. "Ones for―...ones for parents?"

...Jim pressed the heels of his thumbs into his eyes. When he felt ready to participate, he bent over the trays and instructed Houlden with an undertone of, _"How should I know?" _in his voice.

"Alright...first things first...Dear..._Dad..._" Jim rolled his neck around Houlden's crayon to make sure he was writing. "You got that?"

"Yeeeeah~..." Houlden continued, tongue to the roof of his mouth. "I―miss―you...very―very―much..."

"...And...maybe add, _'I hope you are happy and in good health'_..." Jim paused so that he could write that down as well.

Houlden popped his head up and squinted like he had just tasted alien guts, "...Whas' _that_ mean? Is his nu-trit-ton _{nutrition} _poor?"

"...Pffft..." Jim ducked a half-sigh, half-snort behind his wrist―disguising a moment of laughter―and faced him again with the laughter still in his eyes. "_No,_ it just means...―it just means you hope he's doing...y'know, _okay_."

"...Do you hope _your _daddy's happy and in good health?"

...Jim shrank back into his coat_―_his protective armor...

"...Do you?"

His eyes were back to their low angles, looking out the corners with little shifts of uncertainty. Faced with this blind question, he made the following request, "...Let's not talk about my dad, okay?"

"Then why did you say that?" Houlden objected Jim's request with a look that said, _"Because it sounded like you were practicing that for your own dad."_

Jim's fingers ticked_―_one by one by one, like a ripple effect_―_and then fisted together.

"Jim?"

Jim folded his arms on the table and set his chin on them to divorce himself from the conversation. "Nevermind it, alright? Just," he tapped the paper and mumbled, "write _'I love you,' _and sign your name."

Houlden didn't ask anymore questions about his father and kept writing. The paper was flimsy and made crackling noises whenever his elbows touched it, but it survived the excessive scribbling abuse. After he was finished, Jim looked the whole thing over and told him that it was very nice. It was basically just a bunch of squiggles, but he still complimented Houlden on his _"cool skills."_

"Do you wanna sign your name in cursive?"

"What's..._currrrr-if_?" Houlden's three-hundred watt grin shined straight into Jim's eyes. "Show me that! Show me that right here, below this part. Right here! No, not _there_―here! _Yeah_! There y'go! There y'go!"

Jim chuckled under his breath, much like the way a father old with age would laugh at a child running amuck in his living room on Christmas morning, and took Houlden's hand in his to guide his crayon along the paper. Although it was clear Jim had been umbilically attached to the role of a young man holding their wall up against the world, he had given Houlden a glimpse at a real person by something as subtle as softening his eyes.

"Oh, thas' _so _cool...!" Houlden wowed. "How' you get tha' letters so curly?"

As Jim was explaining, a cup of brew was placed in front of him. He panned upwards and saw Houlden's mother smiling with a tray of drinks. Jim scrambled to sit up, while Houlden immediately balled his letter and dunked it under the table.

The eyewitness of the crime mumbled, "So that's how it is..." without looking concerned. He had a hunch for why Houlden did what he did, but Jim didn't want to question it in the open. He did it so nonchalantly that his mother didn't question it either. She simply placed another cup by Houlden, who remained as still as an elf statue, and rejoined them at the table. Two minutes into silence, Jim began to take note of Houlden's trembling knuckles, and for some reason, the youngster wouldn't lift his head to look at his mother. He just drew his feet up on the seat and sandwiched his head between his knees.

"Look, you _know_ where those belong. They belong on the _ground,_ don't they?" Houlden's mother unfolded his legs and planted his feet on the floor, but this only made him stomp in rebellion. "Houlden, Houl...―_Houlden_!"

"_Okay_, already...!" he flared, crossing his arms.

"..._Christ_, I swear..." ― Holding her smoke pipe between her fingers, she combed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her thumb and rehabilitated herself.

Jim held his face in between the loop of his hand, and raised a scanning eyebrow at Houlden. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, and maybe he wasn't putting his finger on it right, but to him, their interaction felt pathetically forced. Not that it ever looked like a solid mother-son foundation existed between them to begin with; it was actually impossible to see the genetic link between Houlden, who was like a living sunray, and his mother, who had no solid definition of individual like an ice sculpture in progress.

She suddenly intercepted Jim's thoughtful glare with one of her smiles. "So open up, _Fearless Flyer. _What's the new saga in your life?"

He stopped chewing and, this time, raised an asking eyebrow at her. She didn't laugh, or smirk, or make any jokes. She just sat across from him, legs open, pipe puffing up smoke clouds, and eyes watching him with that icy pane of glass windowing her pupils. He felt his chest fill up with irritation; glaring up at her from underneath his eyebrows, shrugging with his hands in both pockets, beckoning her to realize he didn't _"quite get where she was going with that."_

Her shoulders laughed up and down as she sucked on an ice cube, but even the merit of that laugh felt incongruent with the bulgy, watching aspect of her eyes. "Start."

"Start _― __what_...?" He felt like it was his first time speaking to her all morning ― even though he was supposed to be at school three hours ago ― so the stumble in his voice stung with that embarrassing, _"still going through puberty" _off-pitch.

She hid a smirky look of suppressed amusement behind her cup. "I'm asking you to tell me what's happened in the last two months with school, juvy, your community service program, Benbow, Mrs. Hawkins ― tea party small talk like that."

Jim's face closed like a door against her.

"Well?"

The face in the bed of dark circles seemed to deepen its expression of wild aggravation. The boy wasn't used to treating himself as some opening headline of a conversation unless the recipient was saddling up to lecture him about discipline.

"Yeah...it's..."―Jim thumbed his nose and sniffed, looking offwards―"...actually been _three _months..."

"..._Three_ months?" She made a "blown away" sound with her mouth. "Are you _sure?_"

He didn't know if she knew his head was no longer set on the conversation, and all that was left on stage was his lazy glare, but she kept on with her theatrics.

"Three months..." The harlot scratched her ankle with her toenail. "If that's true, then those months went by faster than a whiff of tobacco..."

In other words ― or as Jim had read ― the speed at which those months "went by" didn't matter much to her.

"That's a pretty ancient timeline, Pleiades. I guess I've left it to the moths..."

Jim peeled his bread, sitting motionless ― faceless, almost.

"You haven't, of course." The corners of her lips curled into the smile of an overfriendly cat, but the bulbs of her eyes had the trick of looking protruded, as if she wasn't seeing him at all. Her long nose contributed to it, making her mouth remind Jim of a sickle-shaped half-moon.

He was used to this scenery, and he was ready for her to relandscape it. The person at the _Saint James _hotel was the person he had platonically bonded with; the person in front of him was a one-dimensional alter ego he could care less about, and he really wanted to tell her to stop showing him the same woman she showed her bedroom clients. He didn't know the first letter of her real name outside of prostitution; he didn't know the natural color of her real hair under the red wig, but he knew the contents of her real personality under these false pretenses. There was a hard difference between an idealized vision of sexuality and an ordinary young woman, the former of which she pretended to be, and the latter of which she was.

"Am I wrong, or am I right?" She tapped her smoke pipe on the table.

_'Succubus.'_

That was the name licking at his mind.

_'Stop acting like a Succubus(1).' _

Because when not dressing her personality up as one, she was "blank-canvased" and glassy ― almost like that of a person who had just been born yesterday; a person without a drug. Such out-of-reach dread reminded him of a cognitive tempo hindrance rather than a self-projection; something quite problematically in the _psychosis_. Her smiles were present, her responses were there, but premotor emotions were almost always disconnected ― always _foggy, muddy, indistinct ― _with an uncanny sense of _self__-__detachment _fraying her expression. This was the feeling that echoed and re-echoed in the hallway of Jim's mind.

"James?"

She was here, but she wasn't.

"_James_..."

She was in reach, but she wasn't.

In body, physically available, and in conversation, orally competent―_almost __too competent_, as if she were reading an improv-sheet―but her true disposition, when not altering it into a character outside of herself, was some handicapped entity. Infant. Incomplete. Namelessly drifting along the clouds of some netherworld. In a way, he pretended it meant there was an inherent undoing of the normal brain structures that usually organized, limited, selected, and interpreted the processing of one's self and the world between them. Like hardware with a tech-glitch or sensory fog.

Derealization_(2)?_

Depersonalization_(3)_?

A_ personality disorder_ of some kind at work?

Or maybe some vital software programs had been uninstalled to her prefontal cortex where the neural circuits connected. Whichever way it went, he simply called her a _fog_ of a person. A walking, living mist of white, unable to take organic form and shape an identity. Three months ago, she really managed to make a five-hour long connection with a solid identity, and showed enough emotional intimacy to be rated a taciturn girl who liked to dream quietly around a crowd full of realists, so the utter disappearance of this person popped his stomach like a balloon. That had, in his mind, been her real skin ― the lost child beyond the fog and the costume.

Houlden's mother flicked a fly off her plate and watched Jim through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up from her pipe, showing nothing but what he'd come to call _the character _― the unreal identity. Without _the character_, she probably would've sank into madness. _The character_ probably gave her balance. Protection.

...Jim touched his baggy clothing and pierced ear.

_...Did he have one, too?_

Sully wiped her forehead with her wrist. "You were boarded up in my place with Houlden after that nightmare at the _Saint James _hotel, weren't you, kid? _Kid..._?"

...Jim stroked the back of his neck, both working out the kinks and distracting himself from the wet pressure on his eyes.

* * *

_It was only a short walk across the road, but the teeth-clattering rush of cold night air cutting through his bones set his head back in ferris wheel mode. The effect of the alcohol in his system, the anxiety, the adrenaline, the blood on the floor, the fists flying in his face ― it all came caving around him in one wall-collapsing flashback―_

_"Kid!"_

_"H-Huh...?"_

_"You okay, kid...?"_

_His stomach felt sick. Everything in this broken society was normal around him ― people walking, brothel whores laughing, couples kissing, men fighting, no one caring. He felt so weak, so small, so―...stupid for thinking he could exist better here._

_"Jim," Sully jiggled his arm, dabbing his nose with her handerchief. "I asked you a question..."_

_"F―...Fine," Jim stuttered, drying his tears with the back of his wrist. "I'm **fine**..."_

_His thought system was glitchy, and his voice was discordant, but apart from his eyes and the fever sliming his face, it was hard to tell that he was buzzed. He tried to move his arm, but it didn't belong to him anymore; it was locked in hers as she led him to the other side of the street. _

_"Where...the hell are we going?" Jim sniffled up the blood clogging his left nostril as he limped on her cue._

_"Loosen up, kid..." The young adult's voice was shaky, and for some reason, he gained some contentment from that. "I told you we were going to my place. I said, 'You can't stay here. You'll just get killed.'"_

_"...Yeah?" Jim slurred, completely zoned._

_"'Yeah,' kid..." A bitter cackle was invited into her voice. "...Your position is as a real novelty. Your face is bleeding, you're tipsy, and you're still acting as defiant as ever. You're your father all over; right down to the chin, and you're really wasting your life by being that way, you know that? You're wasting your life, thinking you're tough like this. You're not old enough to be worrying about being tough; you should be worried about homework and school."_

_They looked at each other then―a long, close look, and he muttered in return, "Christ...you sound like Mom."_

* * *

"What? You gonna act like _you don't remember?"_ Jim's abrasive attitude finally showed itself. "Like you forgot all about it because it went by in _a whiff of tobacco? _Get _real._"

Sully felt, as Houlden once used to, the power of his distance, and he realized then that he did have a character. By substituting his brighter, dimple-cheeked, vibrant personality for a mean-faced, shady sulker, he had invented his own alter-ego to give his fragile disposition some protection.

"How about this little bit of fluff, then?" Sully twisted the sapphire stud in her nose and glistered over her words: "When you're trying to run away from home and avoid your mom's wrath over a Juvenile Hall sentencing by thinking at a, _"Do I even matter?"_ pace, pick your refuges more carefully. I don't know anyone who'd walk into a hotel _like that_ and not know what _it was for_."

Jim's nose began to flare and redden.

"You weren't on the "coming of age" outpost anymore, you were right in the motherland of adulthood, and it's never a holy place."

"_Tch._" He let his bangs shadow his face.

"Younger boys always want to act older than they are, like they're dying to become men already...but I'd take a step back and think about it. The only thing worth remembering about life is childhood, for peep's sake."

Jim bit the inside of cheek as he tried to come up with a defense strategy, but he restrained himself when he saw how dead serious she was. Her skin looked sickly to him in that second ― white and pimpled with goosebumps ― but he didn't bring it up. He also could've sworn to have heard her mumble, _"Leland was the only thing worth remembering about my childhood, anyway..." _but that whisper was lost in the wind.

If she had said it, then it wasn't surprising; she romanticized his father plenty of times in the past, but it didn't sting Jim any less than it did when she first talked about him. He didn't refrain from thinking, _'My father was better to the kid of a woman he had an affair with than he was to me, all the way to the point where that kid is now romantically in love with him, and he gets glorified for that...'_

If she, herself, had had sex with his father once upon a time ago, then...

Jim's fingernails began to make his palms bleed―

"But three months ago was when it all happened?" Sully sat back with her arms crossed, twirling her pen-thin smoke pipe and licking the jam between her teeth. "I didn't know it was really that ancient. How do you feel about it now?"

He looked out the corners of his eyelashes, slowly dragging those dull blue eyes back up to her, mocking her talkiness with his unemotional passivity. "..."

"Well...if _I'm_ happy during or about something that's happened, I use that to judge how fast or slow time passes after it."

Something about the way Jim held his mouth would've made one think it had been closed forever.

"When you're happy about a past event, the world slows up, because it's all you think about it. When you're not, it speeds up, and the event flickers out of your memory like candlelight. Either way,"―Sully took a drag on her smoke―"you'll go on living your life and forget all about it."

...Why'd that _also_ make him feel off? It was just...he had something to _say_...

_―"It's untrue"―_

_―"Events shape your life"―_

_―"The worst ones haunt you forever"―_

_―"What would you know? You've never felt connected to anything in your life"―_

_―"...Am I really that forgettable to people?"―_

Something like that...something within those brackets.

But his thoughts missed, missed, and missed, whizzing past his registration canal whenever one would form after another dissolved. He wanted to say _something_, but he couldn't find the words or hold them in his throat long enough to vomit them up.

She watched the internal war ghosting in and out of his eyes like creatures under water, but then smiled at her shoulder. Even though she wasn't smiling _at_ him, it still made him feel endangered. If she had "read his thoughts" just now, then the _Trojan Wall _he'd spent the past seven years building would be at the mercy of penetration.

The threat came to life―"...So how did that event make _you_ feel?"―the threat of talking about _his feelings._

Jim turned his head some; chin and mouth hidden somewhere behind his jacket collar...

"The gutter, the drinks, the women, the act of running away...you feel like a man?"

His emotions were all flattened together in front of his face now, and his bulging, wide-set eyes were topped with a frown that made the silent Houlden blink in concern.

"...Don't know," he answered with zero feeling.

She watched him twiddle his thumbs―wide, pink digits that were wizened on their undersides from wrenching spare parts together for a solar-surfer.

Sully blinked her blonde eyelashes, unmoved. "You _should. _Based on the way you're looking right now―you clearly think you've gained _something _from it, haven't you?"

Jim's lips squeezed into the shape of a triangle. Her remark felt invasive, as if it were designed to search for chinks in his armor and unman him, but he wasn't going to allow her to find a single gap. He resented anyone who didn't have a permission slip to intrude on him; he cherished his solitariness as his only and last freedom in life.

"Fearless Flyer?"

Jim felt her poking at his arm with a fork. He glared at her, and then sighed with annoyance. Wearing a Sphinx smile akin to a spiderwoman's, Sully appeared to be looking through his bulletproof vest by keeping silent tabs on his body language, and scrubbing his face with his hands to smother a groan, Jim felt he needed jump into water and swim to get away from it. He was really growing tired of being at a disadvantage with this eighteen year old.

Another poke. "Are you going to answer?"

...He huffed, causing his hair to fly up and flop back in his face, and looked away with the roll of his eyes.

Sully's cool laugh seeped through the ice. "No?"

Something as simple as a lie didn't look like it was going to be able to go undetected by the antennas installed on top of her head anyway.

"Just dig _deep_, Mr. Fearless Flyer..." Sully finally softened, and it sounded more in character with her than the stupid sideways comments, but it wasn't enough to slay him. "Remember how the experience made you feel. It shouldn't be that easy to walk out of it feeling nothing after what happened at the place's bar table. When I was in your situation, my head wouldn't screw on right for weeks. It comes with the lifestyle."

A memory resurfaced in his face like a shark-bitten longboat when he least wanted it.

* * *

_His breath came undone like rope; his sweat glistened like cold rain on the skin; his veins branched out of his throat like a red willow, and he could not remember ever feeling more worthless to himself than in this moment..._

_"...You wanna feel good, boy?" The devil-horned bartender ran the edge of his blade down the bone of his brow, resting it on his Adam's apple. "You in this place because you wanna feel good, right?" He could see the demons windowed in the creature's eyes._

_No deliverance._

_No heart._

_Just Hades._

_"Well..."_

_...The blade was retracted, and Jim blinked against his tears with fresh hope. A grin overawed his cheekbones as the dark circles underlined his eyes, making him out to mirror a madman._

_"...I'm gonna __make you feel good. I'ma give you a smile..."_

_The nightmare drew back his fist, and―_

_"I'ma give you a __smile!"_

_―Pain._

_―Needle-hot._

_―In his stomach._

_It rippled through him―splitting his soul out of his body―crushing his lungs―crashing him down on his knees―retching up his throat―painting the floor in vomit..._

_His shoulders heaved up and down as he laughed back the sobs..._

_―Never felt more real...―he'd never felt more real than in this moment._

_His laugh shattered into a shuddering wail, and he tucked his forehead into his stomach to suck in the pain. Hiccupping and whimpering, his back rounded until his bangs were splaying the floor. Feet brushed past him; some stepping over his head, others stepping on his jacket. __A moment ago, he had mattered. He had mattered enough to be singled out, harassed, and assaulted. Now, he was invisible. A fly on the wall. A bloodstain on the floor. A piece of shit. No one gave him their eyes; no one gave him their compassion...their attention. He had returned to mattering to __no one._

_Jim curled into a ball, mouth spluttering out strings of blood and spit. He was beginning to see things that weren't there: mossy branches; green leaves dripping with morning spring; his father's wet boots boarding a plank; a ship awaiting his departure; his eight-year old face whamming into the ground as he tried to run out and stop him; his broken nose bleeding in his hands..._

_'...You fail everything...' The stars in his pupil shimmered out. He could feel his entire weight beating in his head, like he had no body at all, just a head full of alcohol and past memories. '...You f-fail everything, don't you?'_

_Jim hugged his cheek to the floor and trembled..._

_'...You failed Dad.'_

_His nails raked down the wood, shredding up little ribbons..._

_'...You failed Mom.'_

_A geyser of blood gushed from his nose and melted in his tears like a reenactment of old horrors. He felt it, damp, warm, and copper-tasting..._

_'...You failed school.'_

_Running down his face, matting in his hair, seeping through his shirt in a trail of black ink..._

_'...You failed life.'_

_"Kid!"_

_His foot twitched..._

_"Open the __door."_

_He peeled his eyes open; the void was fading back into a bicycle wheel of colors, and he half-consciously realized that he was lying up against a door. __He could hear pulling on the handle, broken fingernails scratching between the gap, a body trying to squeeze through. His stingy-wet eyes ached from the strain of trying to look up over his forehead and see his liberator, but the blur framing the image distorted it. _

_He inhaled slowly―edging off the door―and focused on the pain whaling his body. He saw the blood smiling on his hands―too black to be real. He saw the white ankles standing next to his leg―too brittle to belong to the father who broke him. His liberator moved in front of him now, blocking out the dim glow of the tavern, but unlike the __Angel of Light, there was no warmth haloing them. All he could do was sit there looking at everything―the bare feet, the naked white legs, the black underwear, the red wig..._

_This person..._

_―His pupils arrest more light―_

_...Was that person._

_She hunkered down, wrapped her arms around her knees, and touched his forehead with the same maternal expression he saw her give him in his hotel room. She pushed her hair off her face and bent forward to clean his mouth with the end of his shirt. Jim mutely closed his lips and panted through his nose, letting tears roll into his mouth. Like a traumatized child trying to cling to some strand of comfort, he held her gaze as though he'd be in danger if he let it go._

_She ran the back of her fingernail through his bangs the way his mother did when his father left. "...You always seem to hurt yourself."_

_...Jim leaned into her chest and started to cry. He wrapped his arms around her waist and willed the suffering to stop._

_"...Then you really are just a kid after all."_

* * *

As Houlden looked into Jim's face now, he saw everything in it go dark. His pupils dilated until black eclipsed blue, and no life stirred or spoke in him. It was like the teenager had just reset the safety-button on his emotions and deactivated himself.

Sully's eyes were lowered as she watched the flies buzz around her plate, but when they looked up at Jim―a flash of stark blue stabbing at his own pupils―he immediately looked down. "...Do you remember...?"

"..." Jim slung his arm over the back of his chair, flicked his hand without talking, and looked into another direction. "Let's _not._"

She wiggled her eyebrows. "Let's not...?"

His voice practically ruptured like an artery: "Go _there._"

Sully tipped the rim of his glass with a finger. "And why not?"

He was now much quieter, more inward; the very shapes of his shoulders more hesitant. "Because I don't _care_ about it anymore."

There was no connection between the sentence and the expression that was on Jim's face. His agony showed itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids _― _even the curls of his fists _―_ and he had a slightly tail-between-the-legs look to him. He looked so _old _before he had ever really lived_ ― _so jacketed in manhood; sown up in layers of guardedness, going down in him thread after thread, and at the same time, vulnerable like a child.

Keeping the little flames in her chest, Sully pressed her fork to her mouth and shook her head. "Your mouth is a real piece of work, kid. You're like the gray half of a cloud. Won't you answer _anything_ people ask you with less bull and more sincer―"

A loud crash clipped her sentence in half. It was Houlden; he had tripped over his chair as he was trying to get up, and landed on his hands and knees as a result. Jim jumped up before his mother and dove over to rescue him from public humiliation.

"...I'm..._o―okay_..." Houlden rubbed his eye with his fist, hanging onto Jim's pinkie as he helped him up.

When he tried to make a dash for it, Jim looped his arm around his stomach to prevent him from taking off.

"Not so fast, _Speedy Gonzales_..." Jim squatted down to the toddler and balanced him by the waist when he began swaying on his feet like a sea-sick sailor. "Gimme your hands..."

Tapping into the role of "forbearer" well beyond his years, Jim gently took Houlden's wrists ― even when he kept snatching them away ― and checked his palms for scabs or scrapes. Other than having scuffed knees, it turned out that he was in pretty good shape.

"Now are you _sure _you're okay?" Jim's tone had an edge of command to it.

Houlden nodded with his head down. His pink eyes were twitching with embarrassment and tears, but he wouldn't let Jim see them.

Jim tried to take the opposite approach by boosting his confidence. "Yeah..." he patted Houlden's back. "You're definitely alright..."

"Can I just go to the _bathroom _now?" He was urgent to get away, but it didn't sound like it was because he had to go potty.

"Shouldn't someone be going with you, squirt? ―Do you want me to go with him?" Jim cut a quick glance over the top of Houlden's head to get his mother's approval, who was half-sitting and half-standing like a fascinated bystander in mid-interception.

"I go by _myself_," Houlden mouthed off. "I don't need any _baby-sitters_ to take me to a _potty_. It's _one_ toilet room for one _persons_, and it's five steps away from our _table_! Watch the door from your chair like a survey a-sis-tem _{surveillance system} _if you have to!"

"..." Jim huffed, causing his hair to fly up and flop back in his face. "Big words for a little guy, huh?" he joked, shrugging his arms out and pretending to sigh, "Well―if you insist~..."―but as soon as Houlden ducked under him and shot off for the bathroom, Jim tripped around and cupped his hands by his mouth―"Just...hey! _Hey!_ Just don't take a long _time_. Don't go sneaking past us to do some _exploring _on your own after that toilet's been flushed, either! I was your age too once!"

"_Alright_ already! _Geez!_"

...Slowly smiling to himself, Jim closed his eyes and flung his head back. He pressed his bangs into his scalp and sighed out a laugh.

_'He's right. I'm being a total pain in the ass.'_ He reopened them to the clouds with his hands sitting on his neck. _'...I'm acting the way I wanted Dad to be with me, I guess...'_

Still smiling at the ironies, Jim thumbed his nose, relaxed his hands on his hips, and―without thinking―glanced at Houlden's mother.

She was smirking up at him from the table with her cheek pressed into her knuckles, and it was enough to U-turn his mood. His confidence evaporated like a water droplet hitting the face of the sun, and his bright, gleaming eyes sank back down into their half-lidded glare. He completely shriveled back into that weathered face of insecurity again, only turning away to pick off the strands of hair that were blowing across his cheek. It was almost as if he _wanted _to prevent her, and the world for that matter, from seeing the sunlight in his personality.

"Well, don't stop smiling _now_..." Sully said with a feigned quiver of surprise.

He smeared the sweat across his neck and rolled his eyes like the scruffy, moody stick of a boy he was. He was about to say something nasty when she raised her other hand to stop him. Feeling scorned enough, he gave her his back as a response.

"...You're really stuck in kidulthood, aren't you?" Only the bridges of her lips smiled, but the expression itself was very distant. She had the look of someone who'd come home from a very long journey after discovering the meaning of life in a cave. "Alright then...what's happened to the boy who was running around with Houlden, pointing at things like an excited scientist lecturing his protege about creation?"

...Jim loosened the intensity in his posture.

There was a note of empathy there―a piece of subtext saying she understood how maddening it might've been to live in his mind.

She closed her eyes, crossed her legs, and wet her lips with the no-longer-hot chocolate. "When he was talking about solar-surfers, stars, or the zoo critters in this _"Island Universe_" wildlife park, he was bright-eyed and colorful. He was even at the hotel room three months ago..."

...Jim's head rotated on a slow axis ― the profile of his lips, eyelashes, and nose now coming into view...

Sully picked up one of Houlden's crayons and studied it like she was looking for the fourth dimension. "Today, he had these poses―little things he'd do with his hands―and it was like a wreath of information about his character was being animated in front of Houlden. There was a lot of sunlight coming off his smile just for him; a lot of love for a little toddler of a boy, but when those moments were over..."―Sully dipped a fork into her meal, but then paused it in midair to rest her cheek on her palm and squint at him ―"...it seemed like he didn't want Houlden to find him again..."

Hand slowly slinking off his nape, Jim curled his lip behind his teeth and looked down. Then―like a sense of security had washed over him―his frowning eyebrows relaxed, and he re-leveled his eyes with hers...

...She smiled against the bridges of her fingers. "...Just _glow_, Jim."

His teeth gradually released his bottom lip as one eyebrow rode up, completing the crooked grin that bloomed across his face. Some sunlight shone in, penetrating a little further into his being...

Her hand stopped on the base of her throat; fingers curling back into her palm as she watced him a moment. "Precisely that way..." Sully gave him the smile of a proud aunt, now coming alive with her individuality, "because _that's _the kid Houlden wants by his side."

Jim looked down and rubbed his shoulder with a shy quirk in the corner of his mouth, pupils climbing back up to her a few soft blinks later...

_"I bet you can fix everything, Jim! I bet you fix everything like you fix your solar-surfers! ...I bet you could fix **us**!"_

He spaced out for a while, trying to stabilize his thoughts and feelings. He replayed the image in his head―Houlden's flashing eyes; his adoring praises―what it all meant to him―how it all made him feel...

Jim returned to his seat and reclined to watching his fingers draw circles in a napkin.

It made him feel _valuable―_at least...to this _one_ person.

"It seems you really do like kids a lot..."

He looked at Houlden's mother now. Her comment was so much of the sort of impression he wanted to inspire in others that he thought she was making fun of him.

"...Yeah?" Jim's bangs fell into his eyes. He tilted his head to shake them away. "It does your brain in, doesn't it?"

She leaned on the table, crossed her fingers together, and used that to support her chin. "...No, not really."

His tongue whorled around in his mouth and prodded his cheek a little. Then came the very intelligent word he must always use in a pride-crisis: "..._Whatever_."

Seeming to smile at his flaws, the prostitute held the cup to her mouth with her elbow in her palm, looking through the slits of her eyes like a suspicious onlooker who preferred to haunt the world rather than participate in it. There was something queer about it. Some weird feeling of disconnection and anxiety transmitting from it again, that made him wonder what she was _actually _looking at.

It was like once the conversation was killed off, the fragile person from _Saint James_ was now ejected back into her body. That quiet, space-cadet of a child who stared at star-dust and nebulas with a kindred look of detachment; that familiar look of painful dreaming...― of _wanting _to be real. Unicorn-like with high cheekbones and cupid lips, the only attribute that would forever stand out to him was this expression. He saw a mirror of his hopelessness in it. She couldn't connect in hopelessness, and he, being hopeless, couldn't connect at all. He mentally replaced her face with the way his had been for the past seven years, and began criticizing the way he'd been spending his life dreaming it instead of living it.

_'...But how do I change that? How do I not end up like this person?' _

Sully absentmindedly chewed on her hair and reached for her cup―

"...Sul', do you like the way you live?"

―Her wrist fixed in mid-lift...

The gravity in her eyes, even if it was weighing down on her cup instead of his face, made the hair stand on the back of his neck. He opened his mouth to carry on with his point, but then paused―with the slow rising of his chest―to suck in some confidence first.

"...What we..." Jim licked his dry mouth and hoarsened out, "what we _talked about _in my the hotel room...do you remember it?"

...Sully cautiously sank her teeth into the head of her thumb, and then nodded. "Why?" She grinned up at him between her teeth and her thumb, a gesture that seemed so rehearsed it was clear she was going to lead the conversation astray. "Did I scare you with my stories? Too scatological? I apologize. We had a lot of drinks that night."

...Jim's shining pupils patterned between her eyes and her mouth. His next reply came without stutters, dismissive huffs, or pussyfooting; he looked her in the face and came at her with the solemnity of a man: "I asked you if you wanted to stop doing what you were doing, and you never―_not once_―answered my question, just like you're _not doing_ now."

In seconds, her grin fizzled out like a spark under his glare, and the whites of her eyes became moist. He zeroed in on unspoken signals, opening up all available frequencies to his fine-tuned intuition, sitting as fixed as water. The unsorted emotions rippling through the calm lake that was her surface personality — the conscience clawing through the feelingless smiles and meaningless smirks ― the knife opening her veins and exposing her bloodstream to the open air ― all amounted to a moment of revelation.

He knew that — _at least for a second _― he had her cornered, and ― _in a sense_, himself. She was weighing things up, thinking about the consequences of her habits; of her mistakes and her failures_. _She was reexamining the contents in her brain, folding up her cognizance and sealing herself inside like an envelope, and everything outside of it was nothing more than a passing molecule, unseen and unacknowledged.

She allowed another detached smile to twitch on her face―a phantom of one―and like a radio that'd lost reception, her connection between reality and conscience broke. "...That's funny."

Jim banged the table and sat back to hold his mouth before diving back in and growling at her, "..._Sully_―"

"_Don't―_..." She held up a shaking finger to stop him, eyes red and haunted. "Don't you _dare_...say another word." Her bloodless skin was clenched to the bones of her skeleton like a white canvas drawn flat and tight over a frame. "I _don't want_―...I don't want to _talk about this._"

A fire was blazing, but Jim piled another log on top of it:

"Right! Of course! Why didn't I know that before?"―Jim laughed out his irritation, rubbing his hand across his eyelids and sinking back in his seat. "I mean, we can totally _talk_ about _my_ psyche until the sun goes down,"―he punched his chest in gesture of himself―"but let's make sure we steer _clear_ away from _yours_. You're a real piece of work all by yourself, you know that?"

His face turned quite purple―with _rage_, parenthetically―as he waited for her to keep the wheel turning. The expression he wore was the same as when he first met her: jaw jutting out like a tense trouble-spot, mouth tight in its grinchy, small-lipped slit. Jim looked up at Sully, and her eyes were not Sully's eyes. They were hollow still, but in a way that had a form, like a real human being.

...Jim slowly raised his hand off his face and closed it into a fist. "...The _things_...you _do_...to make a _living,_" his whisper dropped a key lower. "The stuff I heard you snort up in your _bathroom_...the stuff that affects _Houlden_...do you want to stop all that, or don't you? Do you want to come clean...and _stop_ what you're doing...or _don't you_?"

Slowly, the _derealization_ returned to the girl's eyes, filling them until they were blank and unknowable.

"...Stop _what_?" She waved the smoke pipe around, shimmying her back up against the chair to sink down in it, trying to play off the fact that she was shaking. "Turning to drugs and harlotry to add slight grounding to my existence the way you turn to a flying skateboard? Living behind _wigs _the way you live behind baggy clothes to keep people from getting to know you and seeing the stuff that's inside? _Pretending_ to be someone else?"

She always took the lead role in this theater of psychological games by fingering his mind from the outset to defend herself, but her smooth-talking snakiness was only biting at his temper.

"You and that solar-surfer...me and my 'lewd acts'...it's only about adrenaline―a _high. _Some kind of isolation from facing the real world, and you like the sweat as much as I do..." She choked on her smoke and whatever unshed truths, laughing. "So don't rubber stamp me like I'm the "misled youth" at the table. You don't know anything about the way the world works _or_ the people in it. My uncle didn't rape me. My father didn't abandon me. My sister didn't cut off my doll's head. Not every person is a _victim_. I chose what I chose; I chose my _life, _and I don't have a problem with it. I don't have a problem with living purely off sensations―"

―"Your _mouth_ is seriously nothing but a _load_ of _crap_!" Jim was holding onto the edge of the table now; neck growing red with an adrenaline that made him look even older than he was. "...Can't you _ever _talk _sincerely _to me without _lying_ to the _both of us_?"

He understood that she wasn't going to tolerate any sudden movement of her heart. He understood that he was yelling at his own reflection.

"..."

The silence felt cruel and bone-crushing ― inevitably giving him enough time to wonder when and how their roles got switched.

But again, Jim's voice came down like an axe on wood: "_Sully!_"

The prostitute stretched across the table―practically jumping at him―and hissed out, "I _did_ talk sincerely to you. We laid up in that _God_ forsaken place, talking about stupid childhood dreams for five hours like little kids staring up at imaginary clouds on a shit-stained ceiling. That was my _heart_ in that hotel room. For five hours, there was nothing to worry about, nothing to fear...for five hours, it felt _better_...―remembering childhood dreams felt _better_ than what I was snorting up a straw. It felt _better_ than remembering your father. I left _all_ my liveliness back in that hotel; back behind the walls of your room..." She stabbed him in the chest with her finger, eyes wet. "And I _hated_ you for that. I hated you _good._"

Jim closed his lips and frowned weakly, eyes shimmering. He then hunched over, and said in a hushed tone, "...Then you really are just a damn kid _after all._"

...She sank back and blinked in a way that made her look close to tears...

After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said―very quietly―as he watched the effect each word had on her, "And maybe you don't have any traumas, but it's _Houlden_ who gets the luxury of _suffering_ from one..."

She squeezed her trembling thighs together, hands pressed between herself...

With black shadows casting themselves over the bones of his brows, Jim growled his final word, "_Quit."_

―And her face broke like a vase.

He sank back, holding his fist to mouth, blinking the angry tears off his eyelashes, and then leaned closer, "...If you _quit__..._Houlden would have a _better_ life. If you _quit..._then unlike _me_, he wouldn't have to lose the only lifeline he has; he won't have to lose a _parent_..." His throat felt like wet sandpaper, but he rasped on: "...Because now _I'm_ the one this kid said he's depending on to invent some kind of fantasy world to either give that shitty life you put him in some _meaning..._or fix _everything_ in it that _hurts him_..."

* * *

_"I wanna do this stuff again!"_

_Tired and numb-legged, the group decided to take a rest-stop by the far side of the wildlife park. Houlden's mother was kicking off her sandals and massaging her heels. Jim, who was well rehearsed in the posture of a sulker, leaned against a handrail along the ramps to stare off into space. Houlden, on the other hand, was a runaway train. Powered with enough energy to rival twelve B.E.N. robots, the toddler skipped up to Jim and, with a seemingly mellow grin, began to fire off at him with the speed of a machine gun:_

_"We're gonna do this stuff again, okay? We're gonna do it again, Jim! Real soon―like "real soon" real soon―we're gonna do this again! Next time, I wanna go to "Stellar Park," because you know TONS and tons and tons about the stars! We'll do that, okay? I wanna do that with you next time―just with you next time―next time, just with you! Because really, Jimmy, you're smarter than Dr. Dumbler _{Doppler}_. Really, Jimmy! Really! You're handier than a wrench! I mean all that! I mean it times zenity _{infinity}_!"_

_After finishing the entire outburst in one breath, Houlden pantingly waited for Jim's input._

_"..." Jim felt himself over-blinking; quick, then hard bats of the eye._

_Houlden had always acted like he hated talking, but now that he was finally opening his floodgates, he was giving him the expression of a puppy wagging its tail in full adoration of its caretaker. The fifteen year old almost pulled a lip-muscle from trying to keep a straight face, and in the long haul, he just couldn't stop the smile from tickling the corner of his mouth._

_"Jim! Jim! What'd y'think?" Houlden rocked Jim's arm and tried to follow his head when he turned away. "What'd y'think, huh? What'd y'think?"_

_Jim looked down and rubbed his neck, thinking about whether he should place his hand on his forehead and sigh._

_"Well, come on already!" The dimples in Houlden's cheeks looked like little arrows. "Get ta' talkin'!"_

_The tension in Jim's forehead started to unwind as he smiled at his boots and shifted his chin in Houlden's direction without looking at him. "...Just tell me when you wanna make that trip, then..." he jiggled his pockets and kicked a rock. "...I'll put something together."_

_"...Put it together?" Houlden patted his belly and burped like a grown man. "Why you gotta 'put it' together? What's broken?"_

_...Jim laughed under his breath. He waved his hand; batting Houlden's assumption away: "No―no, that's not...tch..." he pinched the knot between his brows and sighed smilingly, "That's not what I meant, kid. You know all those other big words," Jim peeked an eye open at him and grinned, "but you don't know what __'put it together' means?"_

_"Hey!" Houlden made the face of a kid who'd been raised by wolves. "You tryna start somethin' with me? Saying things like that are pro-vocatory _{provoking}_!"_

_"Well sar-__ry~, squirt..." Jim pushed Houlden's fist away with a thumb. "Just be careful with those weapons of yours, alright? And for the record, you've got a yellow stain on the side of your mouth from all that junk food you're eating."_

_Houlden touched his mouth with his wrist. "Huh...? __Where? I don't see nothin'! Are you just funnin'?"_

_Tickled, Jim shook his head and pointed to his own cheek, "Other side, kid. See where I'm pointing?"_

_Houlden tried to find it, but missed again. "I can't find it! Tsh, I could swear you're just funnin'!"_

_The solar-surfer lowered himself to his knees ―"Keep still..."― and steadied Houlden's face by the chin. He wiped his hand on his shirt, took his thumb, and scrubbed the stain off. The boy's cheeks were so chubby that the bones in his face felt completely nonexistent._

_"And―there you go," Jim leaned back to see his work. "As good as new."_

_"...Heeeyy~, you got it off!" Houlden patted his cheeks in surprise and sang out, "Geez, you really are handy! Real handy! Real handy, just like I said!" The solar-like glow in those sparkly eyes of his had Jim scratching the back of his neck in embarrassment. "I bet you can fix everything, then! I bet you fix everything like you fix your solar-surfers!" Upon singing this next verse, he beamed with a smile that could melt the sun: "...I bet you could fix us!"_

_...Jim looked down and rested his hands on his knees, swallowing back the bile that was riding his throat._

_"...I bet...!" The boy's smile shrank into a frown when he saw his solar-surfing idol close his eyes and turn from him. "...I...bet..." Houlden's words began to slur together in hiccuped sentences: "I bet...I bet you could...because you're...real handy. Handier than a wrench," he gave Jim a heartsick face, "...aren't you?"_

_Jim looked up at Houlden from underneath his eyebrows. Houlden looked up at Jim and smiled..._

_...The fifteen year old ruffled the toddler's hair. Shutting his eyes like a kitten having its chin tickled, Houlden took that gesture as his solid promise. By putting his arms around Houlden the way his father never could, he was putting his arms around himself. _

* * *

**Glossary**

* * *

(1) **Succubus: **_a female demon believed to have intercourse with sleeping men. _

(2) **Derealization:**_ a dissociative phenomena in which there is the basic detachment from one's reality, but not a loss of reality; co-occurs with _depersonalization disorder.

(3) **Depersonalization:** _a dissociative disorder in which the brain is blocking identification with one's self, and inner feelings. It is either the self or the world that feels unreal to them._

* * *

_**References**_

* * *

_Sully ~ parabolic emblem of young prostitute "Sunny" in Catcher in the Rye._

_Houlden ~ named after the lost youth of the novel. _

_Catcher in the Rye: one who saves children from losing their own innocence._

* * *

**Author's Note**

* * *

Forgive me if the OCs were elaborated on way too much in this messy, TL;DR of a test-run "preview." Descriptions were overly long as well. At the time, several seriously disappointing misinterpretations had come out of the shorter preview, and I had to make a few things clear! Actual story-time will now "start."

With that being said, the full drama was penned to have a _slightl_y closer relationship with the original novel while _mainly_ reinventing characters and situations from Ron's inspiration for Disney Jim, _"The Catcher in the Rye."_


End file.
